Warlock’s Fel Armor in 4.0.6

This just in (well, I just checked): “Fel Armor has been redesigned. It now surrounds the caster with fel energy, increasing spell power and causing the warlock to be healed for 3% of any single-target spell damage he or she deals.”

Ok first of all, I am not a Shadow Priest (which seems to have received some damage buffs, which I don’t understand the last few I ran with were doing TRIPLE my damage just from one of their DOTs, while AFK?). This tweak is better than the flat 10% mana increase, which was probably just a random “let’s make them rage and QQ for a bit” filler. It worked. This is FEL energy, not vampiric energy, it might as well DEAL AN EXTRA 3% FEL damage to enemies.

How Does This Affect Us Now?

The current Fel Armor, when buffed with the talent Demonic Aegis, generates 4% of our maximum health every 5 seconds for just standing around looking beautiful. Given that I have 114,000 HP, Truny regenerates 4,560 HP every five seconds.

Now that Fel Armor is just a rip-off of a Shadow Priests’ ability, we generate health actively through fighting, which I refuse to do. Say I had my Felguard pull all 12 Alliance Infantry units and nuked them down. I would have regenerated 6% of each direct damage spell casted in health during the fight. Who cares about during the fight, I already know how to keep myself alive. For raid bosses and long duration fights MAYBE. “But you can use Harvest Souls to regen health too you know!”

Fack you! I know that but since the animation is TOTALLY an Evocation spell animation I try to NEVER use this spell unless I am TOTALLY out of Soul Shards and NO ONE is around to see me looking like a wannabe mage spell imitator D:

Unfortunately I am going to have to grind out some numbers to further analyze this change.

Boss Fight, 300 seconds duration.

Current Fel Armor: Regardless of what the hell I am doing, I am generating 4,560 health every five seconds. Over the duration of the battle I would have generated 273,600 health. Ok fine, maybe that IS a lot of health but its always good to be safe right?

New Fel Armor: The direct damage spells that we have at our arsenal are: Shadowbolt, Hand of Guldan, Buffed Incinerates, Soulfire, Fel Flame, Immolate. At the beginning of a fight, with no cooldowns blown or trinkets blown or mind blown, we will generally be spamming Shadowbolts with Hand of Guldan and Incinerates thrown in. Shadowbolts hit for about 9.000 critting for double, Incinerates hitting for slightly higher, and Hand of Guldan’s hitting for 11k, critting for double. Let’s say an average of 10,000 per nuke every 2.1 seconds. So every 2.1 seconds I am regenerating 6% of 10,000, which equals 600 health, if we pretend some of them crit, we can safely say about 1,000 health every 4.4 seconds. That is pretty blah.

Things change in Decimation mode, when Soulfires hit upwards of 35K with trinket procs and cooldowns thus giving us 1,800 health back every 1.5 seconds. This is still lower than the current Fel Armor design though.

tl;dr: I don’t want to be a shadow priest and the only viable way to regenerate health “out of combat” is to kill critters, which is still super lame because the whole point of this armor was to regenerate health while AFK.

Testing: I’m going to do a test, to see how long our health ACTUALLY regenerates without Fel Armor. From the last time I remember it was something along the lines of 1-5 health every MINUTE.